RSS to Email Tutorial

You know you should be sending email newsletters to your clients and customers on a regular basis. But you never find the time to write them, do you?

The truth is, you’ll probably never find the time to sit down and write an email newsletter. That’s exactly why we created MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email tool. It takes content from your blog (or any RSS feed), and sends it as an email newsletter to your subscribers. Automagically.

If you’re a heavy blogger, you’re probably wondering if it’s anything like Feedburner or Feedblitz or the other bajillions of RSS-to-email tools out there. No. Mainly because with MailChimp, you can use your own highly-customized HTML email templates, and we provide open and click tracking, bounce management, list cleaning, spam filter check, and more.

But here’s the part that’ll make you really poop your pants. RSS feeds don’t just come from blogs. Your e-commerce cart probably publishes an inventory RSS feed (think email alerts when products are back in stock). Most event calendar services publish RSS feeds (think event alerts). Social networking sites like Facebook and Ning have RSS feeds. Airfare alerts are often in RSS format. They can all be turned into automated, trackable email campaigns with MailChimp.

Sound interesting? Here’s how to get started…

What is RSS?

This is where I should give you an introduction to RSS. But I’m too lazy. Go learn about RSS on Wikipedia if you don’t know what it is.

Anatomy of a blog post

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of our RSS-to-email tool, it’s important to have a very basic understanding of how RSS works. Don’t worry, this’ll be fast.

It’s our most popular article, and it’s a good example because it contains LOTs of text in the body, and lots of little images.

When you create a blog post (such as in WordPress or TypePad or Blogger), the interface usually asks you to categorize your article, give it some keywords, and write a short summary about the content. Here’s that example blog post from above, being entered into the WordPress interface:

Notice all the various parts of the post that were pulled from the WordPress interface?

Title (which is a clickable link, using the permalink URL)

Permalink

Publish Date

Author

Body / Content

We’re going to be discussing these "parts" of the RSS feed later, so make sure you review them.

Permalink is a very important one.

Creating an RSS-To-Email Campaign in MailChimp

Let’s put together a super quick RSS email campaign in MailChimp. First I’ll show you how it looks by default, then I’ll show you how to customize it and make it fancy-schmancy.

1. Log in to MailChimp, and select "RSS Campaign" from the big orange "Create" button:

2. Enter the address for your RSS feed.

Note that you don’t have to jump through hoops to find the EXACT URL of your RSS feed. You can just give us the address of your company’s blog (like in my screenshot), and we’ll search your site for an RSS feed. Most of the time, we can find it ourselves. Otherwise, you can look for the standard RSS icon somewhere on your blog. Click it to get its URL.

RSS Validation Error?

If you enter an RSS URL and MailChimp gives you an error, it could be because your RSS feed is invalid. People always get offended when we say that. Don’t take it personally. It just means something is not really formatted correctly in your feed. MailChimp’s not even that picky about properly formatted RSS, so if it fails here, something must be pretty bad. Here’s a handy RSS validator if you’re having problems: http://validator.w3.org/

I’ve run into most problems with RSS feeds that have been customized in some way by the author. Don’t kill the messenger.

RSS Email Delivery Schedule

You can set a delivery schedule for your RSS email campaigns. This is where a lot of people go "huh?" because we don’t let you select any minute of any day for your delivery. Not yet, anyway. So let’s go over your choices:

By default, we’ll check your blog every day for new updates. If we detect that updates were made to your blog, we’ll send your email. If there are NO updates to your blog content, no email will go out. When we say, "every day" we mean "3am ET." So basically, if you add 5 articles to your blog today, then tomorrow, at 3am, MailChimp will find them, put them into your HTML email template, and send the campaign to your list.

Or, you can have MailChimp send weekly emails. Every Monday at 3am ET, we’ll check for updates to your blog. If we see updates, we’ll send an email to your subscribers. This is like a "weekly digest."

Finally, you can send monthly. Every 1st of the month, we’ll check at 3am ET for updates.

Which schedule you select depends on the type of content you publish. In general, most people think "daily" is way too often, but personally, the whole reason I sign up for any RSS-to-email alert from any content provider is so that I can get very frequent updates. So daily is really not that bad. In fact, when we first launched this feature, daily was our only choice. We were flooded with so many "weekly/monthly" requests, we eventually added that in.

RSS Publication Dates
Note that if you update a really, really old post (like from 5 years ago), that might count as a "new update" and MailChimp will send it. It depends on your blog platform. Some of them will update the original "published date" and others will use an "updated date." If your blog platform actually modifies the "published date" whenever you make edits, then it’ll be sent. Again, don’t kill the messenger. That’s just how RSS works.

3. Pick a list to send the RSS campaigns to.

Oh yeah. This probably should have been step one. But then nobody would read the rest of the article, because this is the most boring step. Anyway, one of the first things you have to do whenever you setup a MailChimp account is create a list (here’s a demo video for setting up a MailChimp list). That in turn will give you a signup form that you can add to your website, so you can collect opt-in subscribers (then we’ll manage opt-outs, bounce-cleaning, etc moving forward).

Whenever you’re setting up your list, and you know it’s going to be linked to an RSS campaign, give the list a good name, like "Updates from the Acme Blog" or "Acme Event Updates" or "Weekly Inventory Alerts from Acme" or "Daily News Alerts."

Where were we?

Oh yeah.

Select the list you want to send the RSS campaign to. 9 times out of 10, you’ll want to send to your entire list. But notice that you can also send this campaign to a "segment" of this list:

I mention "segments" in case you want to let users select the category of content they receive updates about from your blog. Then, you can create several different RSS-to-email campaigns that pull from your category-specific RSS feeds, and send them to the appropriate segment.

Anyway, let’s keep it simple and "send to entire list."

4. Setup Email Campaign Basics

On the next screen, you’ll enter a title for your campaign, a subject line, and set your tracking options. I’ve setup a lot of RSS-to-email campaigns, and I can tell you the most important thing here is to give your campaign a very, very descriptive title. Trust me.

Subject Lines

Take a look at the default subject line that MailChimp gives you:

Depending on your particular blog, you might want to change that. The reason I say that is *|RSSFEED:TITLE|* is usually the name of your blog. Do you remember setting up the name of your blog? That was probably years ago. And I bet you’ve changed it since then. Mine used to be called "Monkeybrains." These days, I just go by "MailChimp Blog." But I’ve never gone back into my WordPress settings to change the name. So in the subject line, you may want tojust hard code the name of your blog.

5. Design HTML Email Template

Now the fun part. This is where MailChimp differs from a lot of other RSS-to-email tools, because we can actually design the HTML email "wrap" around our RSS content. If you already have email templates setup and saved in MailChimp, you can simply re-use one of those templates. Or, you can create a new template from scratch, using our built-in layouts (if you’re an advanced coder, you can upload your own design as a ZIP file).

I’m going to build a new template from scratch.

Select the "New Email" tab, then choose the "Basic" layout:

If you want to insert advertising into your RSS-to-email campaigns, you might choose one of the side-column layouts. If you’re sending mostly-text "news alerts" but you’d like to send it in HTML format so that you can have tracking enabled, choose the "Rich Text" layout.

I’m going to pick the "basic" layout.

Note: Whenever you create a fresh new email template from scratch like this, MailChimp’s Automatic Email Designer will actually visit your website, analyze your CSS stylesheets, and look for company logos. Then, we’ll try to put those into your email to save you some time. It’s almost never perfect, but it can save you a few minutes. It comes in really handy, because after we’ve analyzed your website’s CSS stylesheets, your official company colors will appear in all of MailChimp’s color palettes. Makes customizing your designs really easy.

So here’s my basic template, with no customization whatsoever. Yep, that’s pretty ugly. But don’t worry, it’s totally customizable (like virutally everything in MailChimp). We’ll spruce it up a little, but first, I want you to notice the little tag that’s in the content area:

That’s the default RSS formatting tag that we include in your RSS campaigns.

That little tag determines the format of my RSS feeds when they get "sucked in" to MailChimp.

By default, that tag will ONLY include these elements from your RSS feed:

Title

Summary/Excerpt (mostly the text, with no images, links, etc)

The Permalink to go and view the full article on your blog

Link to view comments

Publish date

Author

If you’d like to see that in action, click the "Pop up preview" button in MailChimp, and a window will open, and MailChimp will suck in your latest blog updates from the RSS feed. You’ll see exactly how your content will look in the email.

Here’s a screenshot of mine:

In that screenshot, disregard how ugly the template is. I already told you we’d spruce that up later. Focus on the content.

Notice that for each blog post, it’s only including my summary/excerpts. You have to click the "read more" links (permalinks) to go and read the full articles, over at my official blog.

Links not clickable?
And in the very top article, notice that there’s a link to a funny website (caniuseapurchasedlist.com). On the published version at our blog, that URL is clickable. But in this RSS email campaign, it’s not. That’s because MailChimp is only pulling in the "content" of your RSS feed, not its full code. If you want MailChimp to include the full code from your blog post, then you’ll need to use a different tag (*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*).

We’ll go over that tag, plus a bunch of other cool ones, next.

Advanced RSS Merge Tag Customization

Close the pop-up preview, and let’s click on that default RSS merge tag in order to open up the WYSIWYG text editor in MailChimp:

When the text editor opens, look in the top right corner for a link called "RSS merge tag reference:"

If you click on that, you’ll get a pop-up window with lots of RSS merge tags that you can use instead of the default one:

I don’t want to get into explaining each and every merge tag. There are handy descriptions next to each one. Also, there’s a "quick examples" tab at the top of that pop-up with ready-made code that you can copy-paste into the text editor.

I do want to go over the concept of "RSS ITEMS" though. It’s important if you want to do nice customization to your campaigns.

You know what an RSS "FEED" is. Well, your "FEED" is composed of individual "ITEMS" (aka "articles," since we’re using blogs as our example). Each ITEM (article) is composed of a title, author, date, permalink, etc.

Okay, so in that pop-up window, if you scroll down to the "Info from Individual Items" section, you’ll see these tags:

*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

*|RSSITEM:URL|*

*|RSSITEM:DATE|*

*|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|*

etc.

Those are the individual elements within each one of your RSS ITEMS.

So this is where, instead of using our default RSS tag: *|RSS:POSTS_HTML|*

we can pick and choose which elements from our items that we want, then add our own styles and formatting to those items.

For example, you might add styles around each one of your ITEM’s elements:

If you forget to put those START and END tags in, MailChimp won’t "loop" all your updated items into the campaign. We’ll just stick your one most recent item.

So play around with the RSS merge tags and get the feed to look the way you want. You’ll be hitting the "pop-up preview" button a bunch while you work. That’s what it’s there for.

Whenever you’re satisfied, and you’re ready to begin sending, hit the button at the bottom of MailChimp’s pre-delivery checklist to "Start RSS Campaign:"

After your RSS email campaign has begun, you’ll see it under your Campaigns Tab.

Pause To Edit RSS Email Campaigns

Once the RSS email campaign has been set, it’ll be on autopilot, and you can just sit back and blog. MailChimp will be delivering everything for you automatically. But if you ever want to go back and edit the campaign, you’ll need to hit the "Pause" link before you can tweak it

After you’ve made your edits, hit the "Start" button again, and your schedule will start again.

Spam Filters and RSS-driven Content

Okay, so one thing you need to be aware of is that when you’re writing your blog, you’re probably not thinking about "avoiding content that could trigger spam filters." Nor should you. But it can be an issue, depending on the content in your RSS feed. If you notice that your RSS campaigns are getting junked, it might have nothing to do with your RSS feed (or MailChimp). It could be the content of your blog. That’s what happened to me with this seemingly innocent blog post.

Other Merge Tags to Play With

*|RSS:RECENT|* will insert your most recent articles from your RSS feed into your email. It’s a neat way to showcase other blog posts your readers may have missed. You can tweak it to:

*|RSS:RECENT10|* , and it’ll display your most recent 10 blog posts. Use any number you like.

*|MC:SHARE|* will add a row of "sharing" icons to your campaign, so that subscribers can share your campaign with others on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc.

*|TRANSLATE:EMAIL_LANG|* is a nifty tag that’ll insert "Google Translate" links into your email campaign. So a subscriber can click to translate your email from Spanish to French, for example.

*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|* will display how many active subscribers are on the list.

RSSITEM:CONCLUSION

Whew, that was a long tutorial. RSS-to-email can take a little bit of effort to get setup, but when you’re done, everything is on autopilot. All you have to do is blog, and we’ll deliver your emails. This puts you in more frequent contact with your customers, and keeps your list more updated. What are you going to do with all your extra time? More email marketing!

Tagged

This is MOST excellent, thanks a lot! FWIW, Mailchimp won over other services I evaluated because of this feature. But give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, that’s right..feature request…

The timing options are great, but they’d be even better if we could set the occurrence ourselves. For instance I happen to know that people in my industry are ready for distraction after noon on Fridays (PST) and I’m certain my open rates would be better if I could send out then.

Hi Ben, Just wondering if any progress has been made in allowing more flexible scheduling/sending of the emails. This is an absolutely critical feature for us — we really need the power to send out the emails when we’re ready (just as we do with the regular campaigns). Please say this is a feature you’re about to rollout!

@Johan – I use the list:recent merge tag in my own rss-to-email newsletter. It’s in the right-side column. Here’s a link so you can see an example newsletter I recently sent. In the top right of the side column, you’ll see “Recent Issues.” – http://eepurl.com/YU5

@ Julie – ME TOO! I emailed tech support a few hours back and haven’t heard back. I’m really hoping to pull in a cartoon from one source and articles from a couple more… this would be a great opportunity for cross branded email marketing in B2B applications… I just had another idea – a newsletter that pulls in new testimonials as they come in on your website and combines them with your blog posts…

Multiple feeds can be “mashed” together using something like Yahoo Pipes. Or, Chimpfeedr (which you can find at mailchimp.com/labs). After they’re mashed into one RSS feed, you can pull them into MailChimp. Yahoo Pipes gives you very finite control over the mashing part, while Chimpfeedr keeps it simple. Hope that helps!

Another way to do this is to create a custom RSS feed. In the RSS feed itself you can format the description using full HTML (and using your recent post with full HTML formatting (compatible with email delivery of course) and *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* in the newsletter template.

Just include content from multiple sources IN your RSS feed. Another way of putting it, is make your most recent post include everything you want in your newsletter and just import THAT.

This is very easy to do in Expression Engine (a CMS) for example. I have an RSS feed that puts the most recent article and uses columns to include an image in the right formatted just how I want it and some short excerpts from another section of my website.

Is there a way to use the RSS tags with dynamic merge tags? Say like i have a categories merge tag and I want to see if the subscriber has one of the categories in the feed item and only show it if it does. Maybe it would be like:

Is there any way to convert our newsletter content, which we send each week, into blog entries from MailChimp so that subscribers have the option of receiving them as a feed through their browsers instead of email (instead of the blog first and then email)? We send out weekly newsletters but they aren’t in blog format. I’m trying to figure out a way to give our subscribers a choice and open our content up to more people who don’t want email. (I know, we always want more!)

Alas, we are faced with a client base that receives hundreds if not thousands of emails. Our open rate is not what I’d like it to be, our subscribe and unsubscribe rate is parallel, and I’m trying to brainstorm new ways to get our non-profit name out there while working with a staff reluctant to change their way of doing business. RSS feeds accessed through browser interface is one way to reach out to new people without losing our regular (albeit old-school and old in years) subscribers…much like many news organizations do. Baby steps, I know. But all our staff can presently support.

Elizabeth, I’ve heard that most blogging websites, such as blogger.com, have a feature in which you can send an email to a certain address and it will be converted into a blog post. I’m not big in the blogging scene myself, so I’m not certain exactly how this works, but maybe you could create an account and have that email address in your subscribers list. Maybe worth checking out.

WordPress has a plugin that will do that. I know this is 3 years old but thought I would respond. Check out thearcofil.org and you can see every email that goes out via Mailchimp is turned into a blog post in draft status. It works like a charm :)

We have many unique RSS feeds on our site. What happens if a reader subscribes to several of them? Will Mail Chimp aggregate these different feeds into one email or will they receive potentially several different emails a day (or week) from us? Also, under the above scenario, can a reader unsubscribe from one feed without leaving them all? Thanks!

I’m new to all of this but I’m in the process of moving my email subscribers over from Feedburner to Mailchimp. I created a RSS to email campaign but can’t seem to get the full HTML Post to include the permalink too. Any suggestions.

Email the support team – help@mailchimp, and they can jump into your account to look at the feed and your rss merge tags. Common probs: Not a standard RSS feed (maybe something was customized about it, or it’s RSS published from a custom CMS) or you’re using an RSS mergetag that’s pulling a summary, instead of the “full” feed. Here’s a full list of RSS merge tags: http://blog.mailchimp.com/merge

Is there a way that mailchimp can automatically pull out email subscriptions from feedburner everytime someone signs up in feedburner? I just want all subscriptions to happen in feedburner so I only maintain one source of subscription stats.

I was wondering if it’s possible now just to take the RSS feed and add it to any email template I have uploaded/created. Or does it have to live within one of the RSS campaigns that u set up on mail chimp?

The devs are launching a new RSS feature (or two) shortly, so I’d stay tuned to the blog. Not trying to be coy or anything — I literally don’t know what they’ve got up their sleeves for the next release (due in a week or so).

This is so very nearly perfect… but I need to say what time it should go out daily. You wrote the post in January… could you give an update on when, if at all, you might let us have control over the time of the send?

Forgive me if I missed it in the tutorial, but can you set it up so that only one’s blog postings matching a defined blog category/tag (e.g. “race results” but not “announcements”) gets pulled into the RSS to email newsletter?

Sort of. Many blogs allow you to create separate RSS feeds for your different categories. So you could create a signup form asking people what types of updates they want, using our checkboxes for interest groups. Then, create separate RSS-to-email campaigns for each category, and send them to your list using our segmentation feature to filter to recipients by category interest. You might give each email a different design to match the category, such as a checkered flag in the header for “race results” vs. a bullhorn in the header for announcements.

Thank you, Ben. I understand your suggested process. However, I’m having difficulty finding blog platforms that allow you to create separate RSS feeds by category/tags. While I can filter postings by such, Blogger and Posterous at least don’t provide an RSS for the same (at least I don’t see how). Any suggestions out there? I’d really like to implement this solution.

Or as an alternative, Ben, use Yahoo Pipes as you’ve suggested elsewhere. So long as your desired words are in the body text (“item description”), then you can filter by that word/phrase in Yahoo Pipes. Not perfect solution (I’m not leaving Blogger), but sufficient workaround.

RSS to email is just great. Will this work however?
– you have 4 interest groups
– you combine several (say 8) RSS feeds using chimpfeedr or sth else; each individual feed corresponds to one or more interest groups

CAN YOU SEND CAMPAIGNS THAT ONLY INCLUDE THE INFORMATION FOR YOUR SUBSCRIBERS INTEREST, or put differently: link feed components to interest groups…

Jason – I don’t know of any limits to the size of the RSS image, though you’ll want to be mindful of the width of your email template and its column “gutters” (margin/padding). For example, we set a max width of our built-in templates to 600px, with about 20 px on each side for padding. That gives you 560px to insert a graphic. The typical side column layout in our templates is 150px wide, with about 10px on each side, leaving you with about 130px.

Of course, you can always just use your own customized template code that accommodates the 600px wide graph.

Oliver, our built-in templates are built at 600 px wide because we think it’s a good safe width for preview panes. 8 more pixels isn’t going to hurt you, so you can easily create your own template that’s 608 pixels and then insert our RSS-to-email merge tags into it. There are lots of ways to get your code into MailChimp, but if you’d like the most advanced, you can try our template language.

since we are not happy with the support of our current supplier, I am looking at mailchimp as a replacement.

One service they offer which is great is the following: we import a RSS in an editor. In this editor we then selected the posts we want to include in our newsletter.
We use 8 RSS feeds in one mail and select 2or 3 items per Feed, and voila we had a new newsletter in minutes.

Is there any way we can achieve the same result in mailchimp (now, or maybe in the future?)

I’m evaluating whether to use Mailchimp for a multi-language newsletter sent out twice weekly to thousands of subscribers. The RSS-to-email feature looks potential, because it would be easier for us to post each newsletter to our site, and have mailchimp use that content to send emails, than to have to use the mailchimp interface to create each newsletter.

If I understood this tutorial correctly, I could create an RSS feed of the newsletter that has the whole newsletter content in it. Mailchimp would check that daily, and when a new newsletter is created, mailchimp would send that feed item (not multiple items in the feed, just the content from that one post), to the selected mailing list, including whatever formatting was included in the feed itself, and merge it into the template that I selected in Mailchimp?

In other words, I don’t want the whole feed – I just want the content from the feed, since it was last checked (since we won’t post more than once daily, each time Mailchimp checks there would be at most one new item), to use in the newsletter.

For multiple languages, I would have a different feed for each language the newsletter is available in (we actually translate the newsletter, it’s not an automated web-translation), and link each of those feeds to a different segment of our mailing list (since the sign-up process would allow a user to specify the language, and we would segment the mailing list based on that).

Does this general procedure sound correct? Am I correctly interpreting how the RSS-to-email feature works?

Does anyone have a custom RSS feed template for WordPress that displays the full, formatted content, with images and links, of just the single, most recent post? We don’t wish to change the output of our 10 posts in our standard RSS feed and I cannot find a reference to output only the most recent post, which is all we want to send out by email.

Like Leon, Ronald, and others above, we really need the flexibility to be able to include multiple RSS feeds, separately, in a single newsletter.

i.e. this will enable us to set up an email bringing together content from different feed sources as needed for e.g. ‘company news / articles’ ; then ‘industry news’; + / or product updates e.g. ‘category A’; ‘category B’…etc…

Could you please let us know if you plan to enable RSS-to-email from multiple separate feeds? If so any idea when that update may be made available?

I can see adding different feeds to templates being a nice convenience, such as Feed X for main content, Feed Y for side bar content. No small feature request though, you should know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chimps are on it already…it would be a killer feature. In the meantime there’s no reason you can’t use Yahoo Pipes to merge multiple RSS feeds or if you have control of your website, whether it’s custom, WP, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, etc. – it’s not very hard to do a custom RSS feed explicitly for the newsletter itself, and that is where you can combine content in any way you want.

That’s right, Yahoo Pipes wouldn’t solve the problem of putting different feeds into different parts. If your website is running on a platform you can control / write custom RSS feeds for though, you can create one feed but use the CMS to build each post as a finished newsletter, putting certain content in the main area and other content in side bar ares using the tags and logic available for the system.

I have done this with ExpressionEngine, I would imagine you could do the same with WordPress and definitely Drupal if you have the know-how. Of course this won’t be of help to non-coders or if your site/blog runs on an “out of the box” solution like WordPress.com, Blogger, etc.

Can we create a category wise newsletter template. I want to create a newsletter where i want to show 5 posts of my blog. First post should be from “Featured” category and other 4 posts from “Fashion” Category. I am fetching my RSS via Yahoo Pipe. I tried Chimpfeedr but it wasn’t able to fetch all posts and only 2-3 articles were fetched but never changed. Anyways, Yahoo Pipe is what i like. How to create a newsletter based on the above criteria.

Only problem remains the number of posts from RSS. No matter how many posts i have in RSS still it is fetching and showing only 1 post. Do you see a problem in the code or there are some settings which will fetch all articles from RSS and send out the newsletter.

I think Mailchimp will only fetch your recently published articles regardless of how many articles you have in your feed. If you republish your articles to a newer date you will see them. I set my campaign to send weekly emails which enabled me to show all the articles published after last sent newsletter. You can also use RECENT10 function but i doubt that is as customizable as *|RSSITEMS:|*

Finally i got it working, i had to do lot of research and watch MailChimp videos but got what was needed. Thanks Ben & David.

Following might help others trying the same thing like me:

If you are looking to add more than one categorical feed you can use Yahoo Pipe and aggregate them as one RSS. Then provide the newly generated RSS as url to fetch. Finally go to your template and make a template from scratch (you can also choose and edit the one’s available). In order to increase the width Edit “Email Not displaying area” add an enclosing element and provide width in style.

Code to fetch the feed values will be like this
*|RSSITEMS:|*

*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_TEXT|*

*|END:RSSITEMS|*

I hope this will solve the problem for those who do not wish to use *|RSS:POSTS_FULL|* to fetch all the feed items.

You can use Flickr and use a specific tag per image then use that tag as your RSS feed URL customizing it with Feedburner so you pull photos with that tag. If you make sure only to post images with a tag once between every email RSS campaign you’ll be sending out one image, only, with each email.

We want to create 7 RSS campaigns with a weekly frequency on each one – one for each day of the week.

We publish a single article each day, but we want to include different content per day based on our historical analytics.

If I publish the Monday feed once a week, will it pull what *IT* sees as recent articles (I.e. 7 days) or only the most recent article on the day it runs? i.e. does each weekly RSS campaign exist in isolation of its siblings for a specific list.

We really need the flexibility to be able to include multiple RSS feeds, separately, in a single newsletter. Want to post upcoming calendar events on the sidebar, blog posts in main area, announcement post in another area in the main area, etc.

@Ben,
since I’m not a coder, can you provide a code sample for that? I see the RSSITEMS: TITLE or the RSSITEMS:URL, but how do you combine both? I looked at the advanced RSS code but it explain how to combine both?

Thanks for any help you may provide as this is the last piece of my email template I need!

@Ben
Thanks Ben for being patient with me. I’m almost there, but for some reason I’m copying the code you provided and the code portions like “<ahref" are being displayed. The RSS Item is being displayed, but it seems to be not reading the href coding. Is there some thing I have to declare prior to putting this code in place??

I’d like to send out an email that has two different sections featuring RSS feeds from two different sources. Is there a way to feed two different RSS feeds into one email? Or is there a way to separate out individual RSSITEMs from a mashedup RSS feed by the RSSITEM URL via IF statement?

@ Ben, don’t know how much info you’re getting from the support team about the recent unreliability of the RSS-to-email functionality, but I’m at the end of my rope dealing with RSS campaigns that don’t go out as scheduled. In the past few weeks, this is now happening around 2 times a week, and the problems are not related to the feed itself (they are updated in time and have a properly formatted pubdate).

I bring this up here to make a feature request that could alleviate this problem. Give us the option to send a campaign on demand rather than requiring them to be scheduled. Built in to this new feature would be the option to “force a refresh” of the RSS feed so that we could be sure that Mailchimp is recognizing the latest version of a feed.

I want people to be able to subscribe and receive email updates on their favourite topics.

I added categories to my subscribe form (I’ve used the mailchimp plugin for WP), and created relevant MailChimp group within my list. I then built the RSS campaigns, one for each category, with the category feed address.

This is what happens:
the email alerts work fine if the posts are displayed on the news page, but if they are on another page, emails just don’t go out.

I’ve checked the RSS feed page-works fine. Also the preview in mailchimp displays the latest post correctly. But no email sent. I’ve also created a feed on feedburner as suggested in one of your tutorials, but this didn’t help…

Can you tell me what I have to do to fix this? I feel like I’m so close to the solution, but right now I’m stuck.

Yes, it could be something very edge case. Unfortunately, this blog is not a good place to troubleshoot. Especially since this thread has gone past 90 comments! Can you try contacting our support team? RSS feeds are tricky to troubleshoot, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Hey, Ben! This is kinda nuts, but have you considered using the RSS to email feature in conjunction with dynamic content?

I work for an org that has five divergent nonprofit audiences, and it would be the bees knees if I could use RSS to and Advanced Merge Tags in conjunction to pull audience specific data automatically from my site.

Could I, for instance nest merge tags within the “If” statements like:

*|IF:STATE=FL|*
*|RSS:RECENT for FL audience|* <–Again, this would assume you could set up multiple RSS feeds…

I’ve always used my own email software, but I’ve heard so many good things about MailChimp and the RSS to email is perfect for one of my projects, I am testing it out now. Also, just looking at the UI it is very easy to use.

I have used RSSITEM for looping.I have also added start and end tags.But still it is giving me only one item
My code ->
*|RSSITEMS:|*
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*
*|END:RSSITEMS|*

I have also use *|RSS_POST_HTML|*,displaying only one item.Actually there are 3 items.
*|RSS:RECENT3|*showing 3 title links.But I also want to show content of each item.
How to do that?
Your help is needed.

David – Sorry, but that’s not an available option. We’ve got the summary, which is meant to be a quick blurb, and then we’ve got “full” with images. The guys are considering making some edits to our RSS reader, so I’ll pass this on as an idea.

Thanks Ben. It really would be awesome if they could add in that functionality as we post around 20-40 things were day and if the ‘full’ text is there, it would go on forever in an email but with a summary and an image, it looks really smart.

is they create a custom RSS feed, just for MailChimp. Inside that feed, the “full” version contains the summary, plus the leading image (and they tweak the image’s alignment, which is the feature we’re considering).

I’m confused about one thing. Is this going to send updates ONLY to my list that MailChimp has? I’m wondering about duplication since those that are already subscribed to my RSS feed are already receiving updates.
Can you clarify please?

I would like to send a RSS based newsletter every day at 1 pm. Can you select a specific time for your RSS Email delivery yet? The article is from 2009 and states that select any minute of any day for your delivery is not possible “yet”.

Personally, I setup 2 distinct lists, because in *my* situation, someone who subscribes to my monthly company newsletter is different form someone who wants daily updates from our blog.

But, if you wanted to take the route of groups, then you shouldn’t have to worry too much about people unsubscribing from RSS and also unsubscribing from the entire list as well. You can change your design so that the “change my email prefs” link is more prominent than the “unsub” link. Here’s an example:

I’ve been battling back and fourth with the RSS email and facing a bit of a problem. I’ve added a code to the MailChimp template

max-width:460;
height:auto;

under “defaultText” which is the content area. And when I display the mail, it presents me with a 460px max. But when the campaign went out, it came with images at 1280px, and 700px, etc. It did not resize anything on the actual campaign. Any idea how to force it?

So, we’ll take images from your blog post and just use them as-is. We don’t process them in any way to re-size them. If your image was 1280px wide, it’s going to be that size when we send the email.
But let’s say that, on your blog, you actually constrain the size to be 400px wide, using the width tag. MailChimp will carry that through to the email just fine, but in my experience some email programs will ignore the width tags and display it full size (Outlook). Might that be what’s happening? If so, the image will need to be resized before publishing to the blog. What platform are you using? WordPress does this for me, w/no probs.

It doesn’t email “WHEN” you publish a new post. Actually, it sets up a schedule to check the RSS feed for new posts, and emails the campaign IF there are new posts when the feed is checked.

Watch out for re-scheduling — apparently you have to schedule well in advance. For instance, I tried to move the Daily send time up by two hours on the same day, and the change didn’t take effect until the next day. A support tech on live chat informed me that the queue was different from other mail queues and takes 4 to 6 hours to queue changes to RSS-to-Email scheduling.

1. If you used Chimpfeedr to mash all three feeds, then Chimpfeedr should’ve given you the new feed to use (which would have all 3 combined for you).

Not sure what you mean by:

“Also, I can go ahead and send out a News & Events newsletter on top of the RSS Feed right? “

So you may want to contact help -at- mailchimp -dotcom- to get some detailed support.

In terms of taking details from other pages on your blog, it’s possible, so long as those pages have RSS feeds. But a lot depends on what you’re trying to do, and what your skill level is. Everything you mentioned above is possible, but sometimes it takes a little advanced coding and API tweaking. Contact the support team, and they’ll be able to answer in more detail.

I haven’t really found an adequate solution – the MailChimp staff apparently didn’t deem it worthy of providing even a basic “yes it can-“/”no it can’t-” be done reply. I’m pretty sure it can’t be done in MailChimp since their RSS functionality can only handle a single feed, which is why they have the ChimpFeedr service which mashes all feeds into a single feed and hence doesn’t really give much control over the individual feeds.

The closest out-of-the-box solution I could find was with a service called SendLoop although when testing I found it to be a bit too buggy to rely on. Support was fantastic, though, so they should be an interesting company to watch in the future.

In the end I had to drop the conditional logic, use a wordpress plugin to aggregate my various feeds onto a single page (rss-in-page by Titus Bicknell – also very responsive in providing support) and hack together a PHP script that scrapes the HTML of this aggregate page and feeds it into InfusionSoft via their API. I modified the rss plugin to check the “Last Send” date so it only includes rss items that have been published since the last send.

So, in other words, there does not appear to be any easy way to acheive this :(

I’d love to know if you or anyone else knows of a way to accomplish this. Likewise, if I find a way to do it then I’ll share what I find.

Have you tried asking the folks on our support team? While I try really hard to provide support in our blog comments, I’m not the best person (anymore) for providing detailed tech support. My guess is that you’d have to setup separate RSS feeds (and corresponding RSS-to-email newsletters) for each category of your blog. Then, you can send out separate RSS-to-email newsletters to segments of your list based on interest group.

I like the flexibilty of using the *|RSSITEMS:|* option; however, I really love the social sharing buttons as they appear at the bottom of each post if you use *|RSS:POSTS_HTML|* (the buttons are Facebook like, Google buzz, and Twitter, with nice accompanying icons.) Can anyone tell me how I can replicate that?

These RSS features are really making Mailchimp powerful for complex uses. Any chance this functionality can be added to manual templates though?

We send a daily digest composed of each of our original news stories, and the person here who puts it together would very much appreciate this automation. However, there’s still a need for review and minor changes/additions. I’m working on the template that will make this possible, and found the RSS merge tags, but now realize that they can only be used from automated campaigns.

One idea is to provide multiple feed variables (say, feeds “foo” and “bar) in the list’s settings, each of which can be referenced in a merge tag via, e.g. RSS:RECENT3_FOO or RSSFEED_BAR:TITLE.

I’ve currently got 4 RSS Feeds with a campaign for each feed.
I’ve got a single subscriber list with 4 groups for each of the categories I have. (1 category per feed) So my subscribe is a email with checkbox for each category they want to receive.

If a user subscribes to 2 categories, I think they receive 2 emails. Is there a way to setup the campaign with some kind of variables that will allow a user to subscribe to 1 or any of the 4 of the categories and only receive 1 email with all the content for the 4 feeds?
Otherwise I will have to create a campaign with every option available (16+ Campaigns) and mash up those feed variables for each of those campaigns…

I still really don’t have a clue on how to do this. I am not confident that I have the right RSS feed for my above blog address. When I do the pop up preview all it shows is my newsletter template, not anything from my blog. What am I doing wrong?

In general, our rss-to-email tool is meant to just pull whatever we see in a feed, then plop it into your email template. Publishers who want more customization typically generate highly customized RSS feeds on their blogs/sites, then point MailChimp to *those* feeds instead.

I know this was asked a while ago, but is there a future possibility that the RSS feed can mail out to the subscriber list immediately upon new entries being added? I ask because I love MailChimp but am currently blasting out my press releases to investors via a other vendors so that I can get this nearly real-time delivery. Since they’re press releases, our subscribers expect to get them as they come out, I can’t have a significant lag. Hope you might implement this in the future?
Thanks!
– Lainie

“Generally, for use cases where more instant publishing from RSS is required, some customers are using their web publishing systems in conjunction with our API to send content out.”

Are there case studies or documentation on what these customers are doing? As I’ve found the automated sending of rss campaigns to be buggy, I’d love to have more control over when an rss-to-email campaign goes out.

I believe the case study is still being written. It’s a bit technical, and the guys are working on a video interview too.

Generally, a customer sets up a template inside MailChimp with editable regions. Using their web content publishing system (CMS), which also generates RSS feeds (which they previously used with our rss-to-email feature), they now “inject” content to the MailChimp template at the time of publication via our API. Then, they log in to MailChimp to do slight tweaks before sending to their list.

Basically, our RSS-to-email feature is great for a lot of publishers’ workflows. They can easily make their CMS output a custom RSS feed. But there are occasions where publishers want to only semi-automatically push content to MailChimp, and then log in and manually tweak the email newsletter in order to make it unique for their email subscribers. We’re suggesting this technique to publishers who are struggling with the RSS feature — a slight paradigm shift in the direction of our API can accomplish the same.

As for limiting the feed to only include thumbnails, I’m not sure. Our support team might be able to help you better there. But I’ve tinkered with building RSS campaigns using flickr and dribbble, and those sites build feeds that automatically use thumbnails anyway. So I literally just pull in the full content and image, which tend to just be exactly what you’re asking for — title & thumbnail (with a very short description, if provided on the site). What I’m suggesting is that all our app does is read what’s in a feed, and then display it. So you may need to make sure your feed provides thumbnails only.

Ben, been commenting on this article for several months now. I think this function is missing a major tool and that is to combine RSS feeds within one email in different locations.

Let me explain:

Let’s say your email is 700px width and you’ve got a right sidebar of 200px width.

I want the middle content, at 500px width to feature with images, however, only the image + excerpt (still not available) and on the sidebar, 200px I want to feature several different RSS feeds from our site

Can hardly find the time to continue editing it. I really like how easy it is to modify an email, and create a template from scratch. It took me less then an hour to create a really cool one but as I said I think the developers should look into making it more customizable, and much more complex for advanced users / websites. WWD.com has a really great email marketing that I’ve been following but as I said they do merge several RSS feeds within one email (not combine) but have a section Feed A, Feed B, Feed C – and I can color them, etc.

Great post. I want to set up an autoresponder series so subscribers get an introductory course before getting my blog updates. Is there a way to first put people on an autresponder schedule and them automatically start sending them RSS-to-email?

Not in the way you’re probably hoping. Basically, you could setup an autoresponder series and an rss-to-email series to use the same list. But no way to “time” it so they’re sequential. Recipients would get both email types simultaneously. I’m kind of trying to do something similar. What I’ve decided to do was position everything as an rss-to-email list. You’re going to get constant updates every week. But in the beginning, you’re going to get a distinctly different, additional “getting started” series as well.

Using this method, I was able to get comments inserted. However, I’m not so fond of the formatting. I’d be more likely to ask my devs to create a custom RSS feed for my comments before inserting into MailChimp.

I’ve been using this RSS to Email method through MailChimp for quite some time now, it’s pleasant, and easy, but also pretty useless. For example, full HTML does not come out well and presents the entire article at full. Short summaries are very long, and we as users don’t get the control of when to limit it. It’s also doesn’t stop at the right areas for example I can simply write a PHP line that says to display the first sentence based on periods, commas. Your summary tool randomly cuts off the sentence in the middle, and presents like 4 sentences which is terrible.

In addition, it’s very hard to set up a list (HTML “ul li”) using the method you’ve placed above. This is nothing but an easy tool to import a blog. We as webmasters are looking to syndicate something more complex, and to integrate our website to HTML templates that will automatically mail out. The solution you are providing does not do that. I would really love to see an improvement on this function in the near future. I’ve been asking about it since forever.

The feature tends to output whatever it receives from your RSS feed. There are tons of people getting great results from it, so I wonder if there’s something in particular about your feed that’s causing issues. You mentioned programming PHP, so I’m thinking you’re tech savvy? If so, have you tried creating a totally customized RSS feed? That’s what most of our publishers do when they want to tweak their RSS-to-email campaigns.

The translate tag is awesome for us!
However… It dumps a huge list of languages into the feed.
What I am looking for is more like a single link that would start the process (its quite a looong list!). Is there some way to create a shorter list?

will pull in whatever your blog platform decides is “the date.” If your blog platform thinks “date” should be “date + time” that’s all what we pull in.

The only way I can think of to modify that is to modify your blog platform to change what it passes over as “date.” But that’s not ideal, imho.

Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on the way all the different blog platforms handle date+time, so I’ll ask around to see if we can break out the “Date” from the “time” and create separate merge tags for them.

The RSS-to-email feature, Ben, doesn’t seem to do so. Even if I manage to get the content from the feed, it doesn’t show up in the TOC.Yesterday I got one item to show up in the TOC area, only by using the RSSITEMS feature.

I guess my client will be staying with Constant Contact and I’ll just copy and paste every month…I was hoping for a more elegant solution.

Ah, this actually explains your issue better. Thanks. So, in order for the TOC merge tag to assign anchor links to each title, your titles need to be separated out, then tagged.

If you’re using any of the default “RSS:FULLCONTENT” merge tags, they’re just lumping all your content (titles, content, comments, author, permalink, etc) into one chunk, then attempting to stylize stuff for you.

What you want to do is switch to source code view, then code each item separately. Then, go back to the WYSIWYG view, and stylize the RSSITEM:TITLE with “Title”.

Then, the TOC merge tag can actually find each title.

It’s not reliable to copy-paste code into blog comments, so here’s a screenshot of how I’ve coded our blog’s rss feed (where I do exactly what you’re trying to do):

Okay, that helped a lot. Now I’m starting to understand a bit more how MailChimp works. I do have 2 questions, though.

1. Since none of my images are showing up, could it be that my WordPress theme is interfering somehow with the MC functions?
2. Why, when I look at Source, do I still see your *|… things and not the actual code? I’m not sure what to do with these. (I got HTML, but I’m new at all these applications.)

Thanks so much for your help and reply. I would so like to figure this out for our monthly email digest.

1. For the content portion, make sure you’re using: *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* so we pull in everything (images and all). If you’re already using that tag, and no images show, then it’s very possible something is interfering. The only way to know for sure would be to input another RSS feed to test it out. If images pull for another blog, then you know it’s your blog that’s doing weird stuff.

2. Think of the merge tags you’re seeing as placeholders. We don’t show you the actual content, because your blog content is going to change from day to day for all we know. If you want to see live content instead of the placeholders, click “pop up preview.”

Yes, now the images show up, but so does the full content of the story instead of the excerpt. I’m not sure about RSS, but it sounds from your tutorials here that I might have to mess about with that to get what I want, which is Ttitle, thumbnail image, excerpt, read more.

We had to put a pubDate in the tag to get our scheduled mailing picked up each day. But now the HTML content has an ugly date and time inserted into it. Is there a way to render exactly what is in the content without the date and time?

If you’re using RSSITEMS tags for the content (and not one of the automatic ones as above), and you’re seeing the date displayed, drop a line to our support team at help@mailchimp.com and we’ll be happy to take a look at your specific campaign and feed to further troubleshoot!

Hi Dries, we’re only going to pull in the newest articles within the timeframe you set for delivery. For example, if you selected *daily* delivery of rss-to-email, we’re only going to pull the posts that you published since yesterday. If those 10 articles were published throughout the week or month, then you’d need to set the delivery schedule to send every week or month.

If you indeed wrote 10 posts within the last day, and they’re not showing up, then contact our support team so they can look into your feed.

Excellent tut and awesome service. We are just starting our site and getting into email campaigns. After looking around, you guys are at the top of the game. Looking forward to using this service more as we grow.

Quick question: I currently deliver my RSS feed via feedburner, my feed being http://feeds.feedburner.com/maitravelsite. If I use this feed address, won’t subscribers get 2 emails for the same content, one from feedburner and one from mailchimp?

Is there a way to pull in some titles from the RSS feed and use them as part of the subject line of the RSS email? Right now, you have to use the same general email subject line for each email sent out with RSS to email. This is boring. It would be great if you could use some of the titles of the posts as part of the subject line. This would lead to higher open rates. Is this possible? If so, how? Thanks.

I agree. The problem w/RSS > Email is the generic subject lines. Sending the same email subject line day after day, no matter how interesting your blog name is, won’t cut it. I’m literally about to jump ship to MailChimp, but this would be a deal breaker.

Did anything ever happen on this one? Just having the most recent blog title as the subject line would be fantastic. I’m assuming from these comments that it can’t be done by putting the conventional *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* tag in the subject line. We write a single post every day and use RSS-to-email to send it out, but we’d love the title of that post in the subject line.

Just to answer the question above, I’ve done some testing, and you *can* put the *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* tag in the subject line, and it works. I only post one item a day, and send out one email, so I can’t say which RSS entry’s title gets into the subject line. But I can confirm it works.

For what it’s worth, I write one blog entry a day, with a question as the title, and post out once a day using RSS-to-email, also incorporating the recipient’s first name. So my RSS-driven email’s subject line ends up something like this:

I just moved an email list I was maintaining with a wordpress plugin here to mailchimp! Loving the ability to make my messages nicer looking and more personalized.

I’ve sent out an update message to my mailing list and am working on an RSS feed email. In fact, I’m happy with how it looks now, I just have one concern before enabling it. My mailing list has already been notified about any existing items in my RSS feed, if I turn this on, are they going to get an additional notification? When I first enabled it, the message was it would send the first message tomorrow morning (my schedule). Does that really mean it would check for something NEW and if it was there send out a message? Or is it going to pull my last message and send it out (effectively again for my mailing list even thought the first for Mailchimp…)?? I paused it to make sure that doesn’t happen but want to know what to expect before I arm this sucker!

The first go-round, we’ll send any items from the previous day, week, or month, depending on your send settings. If this is your first send, we’ll only send the posts from 24 hours before your campaign was activated for daily, from the last 7 days for weekly, and the past 30 days for monthly. If there’s nothing in that time period, we’ll only send once there’s new content posted.

If you’re using RSS-to-email, you’d need to include the price as part of the content in your RSS feed. Some users setup totally custom and separate RSS feeds for stuff like this, while others skip the RSS tool, and build something custom via our API. http://mailchimp.com/api/

Hi
I’ve done all of these parts and people can subscribe from my blog and also their email is added to my list but any email isn’t sent when I update my bog. when I click the “view email” link under my campaign the new post is there but it doesn’t send to subscribers. I did a email test at the begin of building my campaign and it did work well that time but , It doesn’t work automatically. please help me.
Thank you

Hi Peyman, can you drop a note to our support team at help@mailchimp.com or start a live chat by clicking that option on our support page? We’d need your username and the name of the campaign and we’ll be happy to take a closer look!

Hi Peyman, I have had a bit of trouble with the rss at times until I figured out what was causing the trouble. Most of the time it was a cache plugin. So always post early an hour before sending to avoid the email being sent. Just clear your cache.

The other issue is once you post a post and it doesn’t work, sometimes it is easier to create a new post. But I found that usually the cache was the problem

Hi Washington! If you view your RSS feed, are there dates present on the feed? Typically, only the most recent post will show if the feed you’re utilizing doesn’t have proper pubdates. For more information about what our system looks for in order to display posts, see this article: I’ve posted new information to my RSS feed, but no campaigns have been sent.: http://eepurl.com/gY0b

If that doesn’t seem to be it, feel free to drop us an email at help@mailchimp.com with your username, campaign name, and feed address so we can take a closer look to help troubleshoot!

Is there any way to make your content (i.e. the ACTUAL post itself, not the author, title, permalink, or anything else) look just like how it does on your site?
I noticed when RSS is brought it, my post is all slapped together into one paragraph in the email. There is no formatting brought it (e.g. bold type, separate paragraphs, etc.). Is this possible to do?

I accidentally paused my RSS campaign yesterday and it was due to email people this morning with several updates as lots of posts were added to my blog yesterday. Is there anyway I can get it to send the intended emails today highlighting these posts?

@theangietaylor – It won’t send any old posts. Only new posts, starting from the moment you create the campaign in MailChimp. If you start today, November 22nd, it will only send new posts from today, moving forward.

I have a couple of questions that might seem dumb, but, I have a site that has a lot of video on it. I have it set now that people have to login to see the video.

1. If I use the RSS – e mail option will the content be sent with the email or will people still have to login to see the content?

2. A lot of times I end up editing something after I’ve posted it. I’m guessing that the 3:00 AM send time means only the edit that is live at 3:00 AM will be sent. I live in Sweden. Is there a way to adjust the send time to 3:00 AM CET (Central European Time)?

1. Well, if you plan to use this for a video RSS feed, there’s a prob — HTML email doesn’t really support video. So what will likely end up happening is readers would see a blank spot where the video embed code should be. You’d need to use our video merge tags (which automatically take a key frame from the video, then make it link to your online-hosted video) but this doesn’t work for automatically generated RSS-to-email campaigns. Yet. We’re actually working on that feature for release in January 2012, if all goes well. But for now, it won’t work as you’re probably hoping. Sorry.

2. Yes. Since we originally wrote this post, we’ve added the ability for you to change the time to send an RSS email.

Hi. Just wanted to thank you for the nice, detailed post.. this post made me have even more faith that sense of humor in writing really helps the reader to read the longest posts till the last letter. This deserves a BIGGER THANK YOU . keep it up :)

Any news about the ‘manual’ sending possibilities?
I want to send my RSS to email campaign not on a regular basis, but like ‘normal campaigns’. Will this be possible soon?

And: how can I add static content to the rss email? Meaning: I want to write a part of the email by myself and the rest should be imported from the rss feed. then its am mixture of a normal campagin and an rss
campaign.
Thanks!

Hi… It says “RSS to email” will only send email if there is new content in the RSS…
Lets say I have scheduled daily sent at 9pm… and we have around 10 new articles daily but not always… I have set my RSS feed to manage 10 articles…
Maybe one day I have only 5 new articles. As I understand I have new content so RSS to email will send the new content… but will it send only the 5 new articles or the 10 articles of my RSS feed?
Thank you.

Hi Peter, the RSS-to-email feature simply looks for all new posts, then includes them all. There’s no built-in way to limit how many posts we grab. If you want 5 to display, but you posted 6 new articles, we’re going to show all 6. You could program a new RSS feed that has its own limitations, and feed that one to MailChimp. We also have a new RSS “FEED:” merge tag that has more control: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-add-any-blog-post-to-a-regular-campaign but it’s meant for people who want to embed RSS feed content into a “regular” email campaign (not for the automated RSS-to-email campaign type).

Thanks for the tutorial. I was quite keen to transfer from AWeber but the once daily RSS-based emails doesn’t work for me when I want to push out a post as soon as it is published. if you could fix that I would shift straight away as other parts of your services seem much better.

Hi Dave. RSS-to-email was meant more as a convenient, passive way to automate content delivery. As such, a daily send schedule (or even weekly or monthly) isn’t normally an issue for users. People do request “instant” RSS-to-email publication from time to time, and I can suggest some workarounds, but was wondering if you could describe what you’re trying to do.

Depends. I can say that Mandrill is more of an “engine” while MailChimp is more of a complete car. So if the car doesn’t quite suit your specific needs, we now have an engine that you can plug into and customize to do whatever you want, w/out having to work around or hack our features. If you’re a developer, you should definitely give Mandrill a look-see.

Hi,
Is there a way to handle different RSS items differently? For example, can I style my 1st item differently than the rest?
If I use the individual RSS tags without the *|RSSITEMS:|* tag, I get the first item, but the problem is that I don’t have any control on any other items, and when I do use the *|RSSITEMS:|* tag, the first item will show-up again.

Great stuff. But how do I localize the feed to my language and country date formats?
we are in french canada, so currently things like
comments | read more
and the date
and the social icons
do not make sense in French.

Hi there, I have been playing around for hours and in my weekly emails the rss feed is showing my entire blog post and I just want it to show a snap shot of each post. How is this possible?? I have been using *|RSSTEM:CONTENT|* and nothing seems to be working.. Help please!!!

I also ran this code, but only 1 post shows up instead of the 10 or so new posts that I have. Thought it was because I didn’t have the *|RSSITEMS:|* code at the beginning, but when I entered that no posts would come through

Quick question. Is it possible to post at 2:15 AM and still have it sent out that same morning at 6 am? I want to send a daily email that shows a post dated for that same day, not the day before. Thanks.

Depends on what time you schedule your RSS emails to go out. If you set them to go out daily at 6am, then we’ll send any new posts that were published before 6am that day (so yep, that 2am post will be included). On a related note, 2am?!? I thought I was crazy, blogging at 4am.

Is there a way to bust the Cache of the feed when I’m testing this? The reason is that I’ve made a custom feed and I’m trying to get certain things to work right, but it looks like MailChimp is caching the feed so I can reload the preview a million times and it doesn’t update anything because my changes are on the RSS feed itself….

Specifically:
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* –> The full content for the RSS item in HTML format, if provided.

If you’re using that, and your images still don’t show, that would indicate some kind of a problem with your RSS feed. In that case, it’s best to contact our support team so they can dig a little deeper:

Nevertheless, it’s a pity that summaries can’t be displayed in the mail with their images. Because if the readers can read all the post when you choose a the *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* tag, why do they go to your blog after that ?

I think I’m not the only one who wonders why this option isn’t available because except this little shortage, the Mailchimp service is really wonderful. I don’t know your opinion on that subject, but it would be a great improvement if Mailchimp could catch the first illustration image (in french we call that “image à la une”, I don’t know how it’s called in english) to display it in the newsletter.

Thanks for this awesome feature! I finally managed to get my email newsletter working by using Feedity – http://feedity.com to create and merge RSS feeds and then using MailChimp for the newsletter delivery.

Is it possible to automatically populate a draft email with RSS content, but then manually go in and add custom content. For instance, I was thinking about using this to create a content curation email brief. So it would contain items I’ve starred from my curation tool (which creates an RSS feed), but I want to be able to manually edit the actual email copy (but keep the links, etc… as if if were automated). I hope that makes sense.

Hi , I recently shifted my newsletter from feedburner to mailchimp , but basic rss feed is still powered by feedburner . My problem is that mailchimp rss to email templates are not showing post summary ,instead they are showing full post . can you help ?

We are using the WordPress plugin to allow our users sign up for updates and select the groups they are interested in. I am trying to set campaigns up so that users will receive email updates when a new blog is posted.

As I understand it now, the best way to do that is to set up an individual campaign for each post category using that categories unique RSS and the segment tool for the list. My concern with this approach is that my users will feel like I am spamming them. Consider this scenario:
I post a post in 3 of my five categories. A person who is signed up with an interest in 2 of those categories will receive two email about the one blog post because of my two campaigns.

Is there a better way to do this so I am not sending duplicate updates?

Your concerns are valid; some recipients might receive duplicates. You *could* lessen the impact of receiving multiple messages by keeping the design of your emails very “lite” and more like “quick bulletins about xyx category” so that if/when dupes are received, they’ll understand why. Not very ideal, I know. FWIW, I’m told that we’ve got a new tool in the works that will help address this issue. It’ll allow your readers to specify the categories they’re interested in, then we send personalized emails to them via Mandrill (a transactional email delivery service we’ve recently launched). You might keep an eye on MailChimp Labs for this app. ETA is 2-3 months, though. Meantime, if you’re a programmer, you could look into utilizing Mandrill.com to build such a tool yourself.

Hi Tom, There’s no way to override the interval options for more “immediate” delivery, but if you really need this functionality our transactional email solution called Mandrill http://www.mandrill.com/ might be the answer. Keep in mind that this would require working with an API and coding so either you would need to be comfortable with that or have a developer working on this for you.

Ah, it’s useful to understand that MailChimp is an email newsletter service that also happens to have an RSS-to-email tool for bloggers (we built it because we blog so much). So coming from the “email newsletter” paradigm, know that when you set up a mailing list in MailChimp, it automatically comes with its own signup form:

i understand well how to import my feed and styled titles, images and text. I am now importing a second feed.
it works nicely as well,
but what i want to do is to style each FEED ITEMS (of my feed#2) differently ?
Let say im calling 4 feed items from my feed #2 =

Hi Ben,
I Like this article, can you please tell me how can I change the subject of the RSS Driven Campaign which should be the latest post subject name.

Eg: if my latest blog post is “How to send Email” then the Subject of the RSS Driven Campaign should be “How to send Email” and when I post a new article the mail should go as the new post’s subject. Hope you got my requirement.

Hi Rashmi, Unless there’s something out of the ordinary with the feed, you can include the *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* merge tag in the subject line. It should pull the most recent post title as the subject of your email.

Great post. If I understand it correctly, it will work perfectly for me. I’ve used MailChimp before for a church email newsletter. Love it in that application! Now I’m having trouble getting an email feed running from my Google Apps website. Was using Feedburner, but now have problems, which may be related to an incompatibility with Google Apps sites. What’s the easiest way to just verify that the RSS feed that comes directly off my Google Apps site Announcements page will work with MailChimp’s email system? The URL for my Announcements page is: http://www.isbellonline.org/home/in-the-news. Thanks! Tim.

Hi Tim, Usually the easiest way to test would be to create a list with just your email address on it and then build an RSS to Email campaign and give a try to see how it works out for you. As a general rule of thumb all valid RSS feeds should work, but in this case I went ahead and tried out your feed in a test campaign of my own. It all looks to be working just fine, so I’d say you’re set. If you run into any questions or problems along the way, our support chimps are available at http://mailchimp.com/support to help you along as well.